In the final reflection I composed on my semester journal entries, I noted that I had found my own authentic voice within my writing which transcended academic boundaries. I continued on, stating that I thought my final project, the “On Being Quarantined” blog, was further proof of that. Sitting back now and looking through the posts I composed for the blog (posts which vary in length, genre, and style), I’m confident that all of my contributions to the blog uphold the voice I wanted to maintain. Overall, the conception of the project changed tenfold, essentially following the same arc as my journal entries did. Originally, the blog was not going to be a blog at all. Rather, I had imagined attempting to write a companion piece to Woolf’s “On Being Ill,” embracing both her themes, commentary, and questions about illness and applying them to the experience of social isolation and COVID-19 quarantine. However, not only did that project seem like a cheap copy of Woolf’s essay, but as the quarantine continued, the last thing I felt inspired to write was a knock-off. Eventually, Madison joined the project with me and it turned into a collaborative blog which opened up the forms we could compose our individual responses.
Woolf remained at the forefront of the project, but rather than simply replicate “On Being Ill’s” thematic questions, I attempted to create my own. I tried to engage with Woolf in the way she engaged with the world around her: with a curious mind and a willingness to accept that things may not be beautiful in the ways that are overtly obvious or at all. Blogging, rather than writing a paper, naturally lent itself to compositions in different mediums (blurbs, song lists, soliloquys). The openness and unending possibilities those mediums created allowed me to use Woolf as either a direct or indirect influence. Sometimes I tried to mimic the patterns of her trains of thought in both her fiction and nonfiction or used some of her words as a point of departure for my own writing, while other times I simply created something that felt authentic to my lived experience and my own state-of-being. Woolf and her work were always a muse for what I posted, but the ways in which I embraced that muse was both of my own design and wholly contemporary.
It seems fitting that this is my final project as an English graduate student at Boise State. It was something I never thought I would ever get the chance to create for the purpose of a final project in an actual class (but I will admit, I’ve thought about creating Instagrams for my favorite authors in the past for fun). Looking back on it, I think it served two purposes: one, it allowed me to engage with Woolf in an incredibly authentic and personal way. I found myself approaching topics in a way that I thought mimicked her but expanded on her as well and felt inspired when I saw something out in the world that awakened some kind if inner voice I partially attribute to her (namely the voices of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith from Mrs. Dalloway). And two, the openness of the blog forum allowed me to process and cope with an unprecedented experience in my own life. I can’t say a pandemic and subsequent self-isolation were ever on my radar and when they both hit in the final semester of my graduate experience, it was stressful and anxiety-inducing, to say the least. Composing pieces for the blog became a therapeutic experience as I used the forum to come to terms with my situation and get out of my own head. To me, all of my posts read as me trying to work through the thoughts that have been plaguing me (Ha! Punn) during self-isolation and then use Woolf’s own model for rumination to ponder them. It was both wholly therapeutic and ridiculously fun.